DISPLACEMENT, SELF-ABASEMENT
When a dominant society adds insult to injury by humiliating those it rules, the ensuing frustration and anger cannot be vented directly at the oppressor because that invites repression and might make the weak even worse off.
The temptation is to displace anger on other targets less able to retaliate. Obvious candidates in the colonies were immigrant groups positioned between indigenous peoples and Europeans in the economic and status hierarchy. Indigenes angry over rising prices of consumer goods found it easy and relatively safe to take out hostility on Chinese retail merchants in Southeast Asia and Indian and Levantine merchants in sub-Saharan Africa. Another candidate was an indigenous group whose members were adept at seizing new opportunities for upward mobility—Kasai Baluba in theBelgian Congo, for example. Although the role of displacement in intergroup hostility cannot be convincingly shown, it probably escalated the level and intensity of many conflicts. When colonized groups were pitted against each other in riots, arson, and looting, Europeans may have had a difficult time restoring order—but a relatively easy time retaining a dominant position above the fray.A subordinated group can focus anger on another target: itself. Colonized peoples were told repeatedly and in all sorts of ways that they were inferior. Some people hated their rulers for saying this. Others came to believe that the charge contained elements of truth, and as a result they felt shame, humiliation, embarrassment, and self-doubt.12 The more they valued imported consumer goods and technologies the more susceptible they were to the taunt that their culture was a failure because it had not been as inventive as that of Europeans. A damaging further implication was that racial disparities in material and scientific achievement mirrored unequal accomplishment in all spheres of life, including intellectual development, morality, spiritual insight, language, and political organization.
Once implanted in the mind, collective self-doubt is hard to eradicate. One does not have to believe that all accusations of inferiority are true, but only to suspect that some of them might be. People are haunted by a nagging question: Could it be that our inferior political status is the result rather than the cause of our low standing in the human race? The damaged self, moreover, could be an individual as well as a collectivity. If I believe that a racial or ethnic group to which I belong is inferior, it is but a short step to believing that I personally am unworthy.
The Tunisian writer Albert Memmi analyzes the psychology of self-abasement in these terms:
Constantly confronted with this [negative] image of himself, set forth and imposed on all institutions and in every human contact, how could the colonized help reacting to his portrait? It cannot leave him indifferent and remain a veneer which, like an insult, blows with the wind. He ends up recognizing it as one would a detested nickname which has become a familiar description. The accusation disturbs and worries him even more because he admires and fears his powerful accuser. “Is he not partially right?” he mutters. “Are we not all a little guilty after all? Lazy, because we have so many idlers? Timid, because we let ourselves be oppressed?” Willfully created and spread by the colonizer, this mythical and degrading portrait ends up by being accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized. It thus acquires a certain amount of reality and contributes to the true portrait of the colonized.13
Self-abasement can have serious political implications. When people believe they are unable to govern themselves and would make a mess of things if they replaced those in authority, their desire for autonomy is undermined. E. F. E. Douwes Dekker, a Eurasian who founded the Indische Party in the Dutch East Indies in 1912, put the problem this way: “There is nothing we need so much as self-assurance and self-confidence. We must get rid of our timidity. It is a hindrance to us, it damages us. On the contrary, we must feel in us a strong sense of our own worth, a realization that we are not inferior to anybody.”14
More on the topic DISPLACEMENT, SELF-ABASEMENT:
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- Chapter 7 Modelling Cultural Shift: Application to Processes of Language Displacement
- Moving Linguistic Borders
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- Answering some worries
- Other Changes Associated with Aging
- Learning Objectives